Tuesday, 31 May 2011

As the title says....and I know what my opinion is. This just makes me so angry, disgusted and disappointed in humanity.....all over again. I also make absolutely no apology for my opinions expressed here.

After just seeing a graphic video on the news an hour ago about what's happening to live cattle exported from Australia to Indonesia, I can't help feeling a lot less respect for the human race than I have had in recent times. Which isn't much, I can tell you.

I'm by no means saying this sort of thing doesn't happen in my own country because it does, by individuals mainly, not abattoir workers, and not on this kind of scale unless we just don't hear about it. That wouldn't surprise me as some of the cattle farmers interviewed are more worried about their livelihood than the cattle they send to be tortured. The Govt covers up things the public don't need to hear until it's too late, like importing beef from Argentina that has been exposed to Mad Cow's Disease. Why do we even need to import beef when we have our own industry? I know, I know, because the best goes out of the country to bring money in. Duh!

Then there's the battery chicken industry, and the way pigs and other livestock are farmed. Genetically altered crops and irradiated food, things that will eventually come back to bite the human race. Human greed just never stops. How about more humans in overpopulated areas practice birth control? The trouble is people in poor overpopulated countries aren't being fed and are starving while the rest of the world wastes, wastes and wastes yet wants more and more. It just goes on and on, but that's another story than what I started with.

There are hunters who do the same to kangaroos and other animals as is happening to these cattle, and others (teenagers) who do things like cut off a two month old puppies' ears, front paws and tail leaving it to die, setting kittens alight in a public mall, restraining a cat in the boot of a car connected to a battery so it gets severe electric shocks (adult perpetrator,) and other terrible things. And these are just recent, over the past year or so and were discovered. Both the puppy and cat were rescued and fortunately have been re-homed.

I just can't find a word to describe how low and base this kind of thing is. People who do these things are just a step away from doing it to children and other people if they don't already.. The saddest thing is it's often teenagers or younger kids who are the cruelest, but not always.

Frankly I don't know how the people involved working in those abattoirs, and others I very much expect, call them selves anything but disgusting, subhumans and deserving of the same treatment they gave those animals. But that would never happen would it because some of us are civilized humans and try to behave like it.

This is not ignorance. It's deliberate, sadistic cruelty.

I fully realize these cattle were sent for slaughter to feed humans, but this blatant cruelty should be seen as horrific to any sane thinking person. However, knowing a bit about human nature and being exposed to the opinions of this kind of scum on the Internet leads me to think otherwise in a LOT of cases.

Poking live cattle in the eyes with blades, kicking them in the head multiple times, sawing their throats with blades over long periods instead of using the proper methods, dismembering them while alive....and more... all while the beasts are alive and conscious. Is this acceptable?

If there are people who don't find thisunacceptable there is something very, very wrong. This isn't just over reaction. This is wrong on so many levels. There was huge controversy a number of years ago and is probably still happening regarding live sheep exports from here to Saudi Arabia where sheep were practically boiled to death in the holds of transport ships during the hottest months without any care at all. No feed, no water. Then they were often rejected by the recipient because of the poor quality on arrival and sent back or just died. What is it with people that they behave this way?

These are links to the actual video footage and I believe it needs to be seen by all right thinking people so these types of things can be stopped. This is the main reason I'm linking them.

I won't embed them from Youtube, if they are there, or other sources. They show torture and targeted cruelty and are just too horrific. This is the Four Corners expose with video links. Click"iview" or the ABC link at the bottom and the videos are there. I warned you so be prepared, and I would make sure children DO NOTsee these images.http://www.abc.net.au/4corners/content/2011/s3228880.htm

I said elsewhere on this blog that I wouldn't disrespect anyone's religion and I'm not starting now with any specific one....

BUT, I just bet this human scum and others like them all over the world perpetrating acts like this on animals, children and other adults every day, go to their churches every week or however they practice, and pray to their benevolent God believing they are good and humane, well behaved citizens. Such hypocrisy makes me sick, and there's no explanation that could possibly justify it to me.

The human race is devolving morally at a smart pace and the good will never inherit the earth while the balance is so tipped in the opposite direction. We might be getting smarter, but at the other end of the scale we are a very flawed and damaged race, generally speaking. I'm glad I won't be around to see the future, if there is a liveable one, unless there's some monumentally drastic change.

There's so much I would like to discuss and talk about on all these subjects but I'll leave it for now. Besides, I only have myself and my dog to talk to so .........this is why the blog exists.

Monday, 30 May 2011

I was going to change the layout of this blog so Youtube videos fit better and don't overlap, but none of the other options work very well with my other preferences so it's staying as is....as much as it irks me.

Other than the video thing, I like my current layout even though I realize it might be hard for some to read anything with the flowery background. I like it though, for the time being anyway.

I ran across this today and it reminded me of how I used to listen to it often back in my younger days. I even had a poster of it on my bedroom wall.

The actual poem, Desiderata, which means Things to be Desired in Latin, was written by Max Ehrmann in the 1920's. It was once believed that it was "found" in an old church in 1692, but that's been proven otherwise. As often happens with great works whether it's art, sculpture or poetry this poem was never well known until after the death of the author. Anyway there's info here for anyone interested.http://www.fleurdelis.com/desidera.htm

Click to enlarge (if you like) so you can read the words. It's worth it.

I trimmed it a bit for this post, but kept the website name at the bottom. The trimmed part was a plain coloured background. As requested by the author I've also added a link to the site in the Sidebar under Links. There's a lot of very nice artwork and murals there as well.

In 1972 Les Crane had a top ten hit with his spoken version of this poem. I don't know if anyone else has done it, but I like this for it's simplicity and non modernization.

Friday, 20 May 2011

Well, I must have been hiding under a rock because supposedly this has been in the news for awhile now, or I just don't watch the right news channels. However, it's all over the TV and internet news today.http://au.news.yahoo.com/opinion/post/-/blog/australianskeptics/post/1142/comment/1/
According to U.S. evangelist Harold Camping at 6pm tomorrow, less than 24 hours from now where I live, the Rapture is going to happen as he predicted by decoding passages of the Bible. Approximately three million believers will be saved and the rest of us, as well as millions of other believers I imagine, will suffer unimaginable torment until some date in October this year. Three million out of the current world population is a small number, but I'm not bothered enough to find out what the criteria is for being saved according to Camping. It's probably too late anyway.

The trouble with his scenario is he's predicted the end of the world three times previously and it never happened. An interviewer on TV tonight asked him if he could have a followup interview on Sunday if it doesn't happen, to which he replied he wouldn't be here, so it wouldn't be possible. He's an old man of 89 years, so it's quite possible he won't be for other reasons than his predictions.http://judgementday2011.com/

Correction: Seems I was wrong about how many times he's already predicted the end. I don't know where I read it was three times, but it seems it was only once.

Notice at the above link (and others) a lot of people are making money out of people's beliefs and fears. No surprise really. That site is selling mugs and T-shirts and it's supposedly a serious site and not a parody.

I'm not a religious person in any shape or form, but I think this is fear mongering and profiteering of the worst kind by misguided individuals targeting vulnerable people and even causing panic in some cases. As far as I'm concerned people should be free to believe what they like, but when it hurts others and takes advantage of their faith it should be a criminal offense.

Of course if it happens a lot of others besides myself are in for a torrid five months before the End of Times, starting on Sunday. The weather bureau has forecast very heavy rain and wind here at least for the next few days so who knows. Then again, it is the beginning of winter.

Just to note...
It's not my intention to ridicule anyone's religious beliefs, but these doomsayers and TV evangelists have a lot of power, (and money), invested in what they do. I hope they have a conscience and pay taxes, which they probably don't being a religious organization. Not to mention they'll need a good reason why it didn't happen...again. But I can pretty much guess what that will be.

People should keep an open mind, stick with what they believe and gain comfort from, and seek guidance from their normal spiritual sources instead of listening to nutters predicting doom and gloom as they have since the dawn of time. Unfortunately, the vulnerable living in countries without full access to differing opinions and freedom of faith are the ones who will suffer through this kind of misinformation and fear mongering.

UPDATE: Sunday May 22nd at 1:30pm...
Well, it seems the Apocalypse was averted, as expected, and Harold Camping is unavailable for comment. Who could have predicted that would happen?

Sunday, 8 May 2011

Just after I say I have no issues with Fallout New Vegas I have the first crash in 20 plus hours after installing the new patch and creating a new character I really like, and now my Pipboy is rotated 45 degrees when I reload the game. It's happening with all saves so it's not embedded into the most recent one.

I use the Readius mod, however if I remove it according to instructions and get the default Pipboy back it is also rotated so I can't see the screen.

I've researched everywhere I can think of including the Readius mod page where a couple of other people mention the same issue, but no solutions have come up. I'm going to be very, very annoyed if I have to reinstall the game and have to download a ton of data in patches and updates.

I get really sick of having to tweak and fix problems with newer games and long for the days when games just worked. I can fix any issues with Oblivion myself or usually find the info to do it if I can't, but with Fallout NV I have no idea.

Here's a pic of the issue and if I ever find out the solution without having to reinstall I'll be sure to post it here for others to use if they have this happen.

UPDATE: Thanks to some helpful suggestions from a nice person I've got my game back to normal.

When I had the crash it was after 4 in the morning and I was more than a little annoyed with the resulting problems and trying to find solutions on the Net without a result.

However, tonight I started a new game with a test character (as I haven't had time earlier today) and with no mods at all enabled and the Pipboy was back to normal. Out of a sense of hope I also retried my existing character saves and they now work as well with all mods enabled including the Readius. They didn't previously and I tested all 30 of them which a was painfully long experience. I've also deleted the saves closest to where the crash happened and have been back now to the same area and done everything again with no problems...so far. Fingers crossed.

Another thing I did was go online with STEAM (I always play offline) and got it to verify the file cache after I tried the new game so I'd know which fixed the problem. There were two files that needed to be re-downloaded which were obviously small as it only took a few seconds.

It's probably a wild guess but I wonder if starting the new game changed something in the ini. The files from STEAM seem to have been co-incidental. No idea really, but I'm glad I don't have to start over...again.

Friday, 6 May 2011

Today I decided to clean up and remove a lot of extraneous crap that's been sitting around on my system for ages and never gets used. One of the things I tend to do is unzip files eg Oblivion and Fallout:NV mods, to see what files they contain and if I might want to use them in personal projects, but not immediately install them in my games. Many of these tend to be quite large (GB's in some cases) and are within folders, so I forget to go back and delete or move them, hence the declining space on my hard drive. Fixed that.

I also keep things like music, game files, video and other files on the hard drive even though they are well and truly backed up so I don't have to be copying them back every time I want them which also takes a lot of room. Fixed that as well.

The other is games I no longer play but keep installed in case I might change my mind and in many cases I don't. Arcania: Gothic 4 is one of those. It never got my attention enough to play past the tutorial and it's been installed since November last year after I bought it in the mistaken belief it would turn out to be what I hoped was a Gothic game. Or even resembling one, which it doesn't. Maybe subconsciously I was hoping it would morph into something else while I wasn't looking, but alas not.

The main reason I mention this game is it amused me when I uninstalled it because I was asked to revoke my License online before I could uninstall the game. There was a manual option, but I'll never reinstall so that's no issue. Then, another dialogue box popped up asking if I wanted to remove Securom, all it's registry entries andintrusive files. Needless to say it didn't say that last bit.

This amused me even more. Of course I wanted to remove the copy protection for a game I uninstalled and in this case will never play again. Anyway, by removing that game alone I gained back nearly 9GB. Most good games aren't that big!

Now I've done a cleanup I can get busy adding more files and doing it all again sometime in the near future.

Monday, 2 May 2011

It was brought to my attention the other day that someone uploaded my Twin Pixies mod to Tesnexus without asking or mentioning it to me.

It says at the bottom of ALL of my Readme's they must not be uploaded anywhere for any reason, to any site that I don't upload them to myself. If I wanted them at Tesnexus I would have done it myself and I don't intend to do so. The people who did manage to download it may find it doesn't work for them and I don't intend to remedy that situation.

I do keep a daily eye on many mod sites and forums, English and other languages, because I play Oblivion and download mods myself, so don't think I won't know about it just because I don't have a high profile in the community. Some sites I can do little about, but the ones I can will be asked to remove them if they don't bother to contact me first. It's just polite, especially when I request to be asked first. Is that so hard?

Recently all of my files were uploaded to Softpedia by their staff without asking me despite my Readme information which they did NOT include on their page entries. I received over 15 emails, one for every mod, saying they were doing this and in the middle of that I received another to say they were removing them because they had failed to check my information. That should have been done first, not after and it isn't hard to do since it's included in the archive.

Removal was voluntary on Softpedia's part in my case, but an email I sent to their Games Manager about it was ignored. I may not have minded if they had asked first, but their tactics were underhanded and just rude so even if they did ask after the fact the answer would be, NO.

Now it's happening to other modders without their consent, but they don't seem to be as lucky as I was at getting them removed. It seems the staff at Softpedia are ignoring them, so I hope something can be done about it.

My mods may not be earth shaking, but they are personal to me and despite what many people say about modder's rights and being selfish to the user community for not sharing, I can and will do what I like with them. Default content belongs to Bethesda, custom content I have permission to use belongs to the creator and in my case certain texts in the form of books and notes belong to me.

It's people who think they have a given right to anything and everything and have childish tantrums because they can't always have what they want that makes it hard for the mature and sensible mod users. All I can say to them is grow up, realize the world doesn't revolve around you, sharing is voluntary and some of you just don't deserve anything.

I'm not going to do a big write up at the moment about how I feel about this game, except to say,in my opinion, it's far superior to Fallout 3 with a much more imaginative story, STEAM is a much better platform than GFWL, and it's been stable and glitch free for me since I bought it on release day. Oh, and it's patched to the latest as of a few days ago and still I have no issues.

I'm also sick to death of the winging and whining about this and other games, about STEAM, bugs and other issues that can be hard to fix in games of this size and complexity, (even for the developers), and the general laziness of some people when it comes to researching problems and doing a bit of self help.

The "I'm not getting a game that requires STEAM," comment that I've seen many times and then lo and behold these people now have the game and do nothing but whine and complain. If it's so bad why bother?

Yes, I do a lot of forum lurking and reading to get info on various things so I see these types of useless posts, among others. And yes, there are people who do have genuine problems with this and other games, and I feel for them, but there are a lot who just complain for the sake of it. Some people are just never happy no matter what they have.

I realize I'm lucky NOT to have any issues at all with this game including no CTD's and I'm not the only one. I also play at high resolution and the highest settings my graphics card will allow and the game looks and runs perfectly. However, looking great in game doesn't always transfer to screen shots due to lighting and other stuff not really worth mentioning, but that's not my main interest anyway. 99% of the time I play in 1st person so it probably doesn't matter what she looks like after all. Same with Oblivion. I find myself playing more in 1st person these days unless I want to take a screen shot of my character.

After not having played the game for a couple of months because there were other games and things to do, I'm now role playing a new character called Anna Blake, a bounty hunter and desert dweller taking what she wants when she wants it. She has a story, but I'll type that up later.

This is my mod list at the moment, which is a bit bare compared to Oblivion, and I most highly recommend playing with A World of Pain, Monster Mod and New Vegas Bounties at the least. And I must mention CONELRAD radio, an excellent addition to the four or five songs (it seems ) in the original game. Then there's Ling's and TYPE3 by Exeter for better looking female characters.

May 10 2011 - UPDATED: Change in mods Couple of removals and a couple of additions.

This is something cute that I like. You'll notice a mod in the list called NCR Doggie Buddies and it adds NCR helmets to all the dogs as well as turning them into Alsations instead of the mangy, uncared for diseased dogs the NCR have around. This contrary to the fact the NCR mention how well they look after their animals. The Legion dogs are better cared for and the Legion are assholes. I guess they're not all bad.

Better image.

Further adventures. This was hair raising..lol. Courtesy of the very excellent World of Pain mod.

Anna the Bounty Hunter

Corgis by Nivea. Getting them all to stay in one place took awhile as they behave like real dogs in follow and stay mode, so they don't just stand around doing nothing. Get it here:

Sunday, 1 May 2011

Sometimes I wonder if it's worth having a car. With the high yearly Registration Fees, Insurance, fuel, maintenance and many other costs, it's a money pit. Never owned a house and I don't have kids, but a car has to come high on the list of high cost items especially when the warranty runs out.

My current car belonged to my mother and when she passed several years ago, it was left to me. I have to say though it has been very good and the only real costs have been a couple of new batteries, exhaust system replacement and the usual things. Nothing major until recently.

The problem with this car is it has an anti theft system (not an alarm) which has a remote engine immobiliser and was fitted to the car by a previous owner, before my mother purchased it. The only info on it comes in the form of a card saying how to arm and disarm it and how to start the car if the keys are lost with an Emergency Override Button.(Note this bit in bold.)

This hasn't given me too many problems until the last eight months or so when it started not allowing me start the car as though the remote (I also have a spare) isn't turning off the system. Sometimes it will start and others it won't. I even bought a new battery a few months back because I thought it was part of the problem and in fact if I keep trying to start the damn thing it does run the risk of flattening the battery. I had the ignition checked and the starter motor and there's nothing wrong with them.

The Auto Electrician I took it to says he's sure it's the immobiliser, but I should be able to start it with the Override Button which is supposedly hidden under the dash somewhere so one can hold the switch in and start the car at the same time. I've been all over it with a fine tooth comb and cannot find a button, switch or any other kind of device that didn't come with the original wiring according to the car manual.

There isn't one, and on the little card it says it'soptional. Who in their right mind would have an "optional" override in case you can't get your own car started in an emergency or just for normal use.

Since the company who made it seems to have gone out of business and I can't find a shred of info on the type of anti theft system I have, AND that the electrician said it would be expensive to remove, I'm up the creek without a paddle. So, now I'm unable to get out of the house except by taxi, which costs a fortune, so that will only be on grocery shopping day once a fortnight. There's no bus service anywhere near me and I have no family (except in name only, but that's another story), my neighbours are a frail old man and a violent, scary guy and neither of them have a vehicle anyway.

This post started about my car, but it's just one more step in the downward depressive spiral that's always been my life. Just now, and primarily for other reasons obviously than just the car, I'm finding it hard to care about anything.

I know there are worse things happening in the world besides my problems and knowing that doesn't help, but it's dark in here just now.

I found this quote, (among others), on a website that fits me exactly. "A strong girl keeps her stuff in line and with tears running she still manages to spit the simple words, "I'm Fine."

That's me. Outside always the strong one, inside fading away a bit more each day. I've been down further than I am now and clawed my way out of the hole to some kind of fake normality, but then I had reason to. Now, I don't know what each day has in store or how I'll feel when I wake up. I do know I'm sick of being the one who does all the giving and getting nothing back. I just wish someone would care about me for a change. I've tried not being so accommodating and "nice' but it's just not me, and so the circle continues.

If you've ever been depressed you'll understand and I empathize with you.
If you haven't experienced true clinical depression and think it's all in the mind as I know a lot of people do, well you're right, it is, clinically not imaginary, but it's not something that's just cured by a couple of aspirin and a cup of tea. Until people have experienced it and know how crippling it can be, no-one can say it's imaginary.

I'm only saying that because I know of people who think that way. They should hope they never have to go through it because it can happen to anyone at any time.